Shit Hike by Callie Garnett

A walking poet, Callie Garnett often composes poems while out on a tramp, but this newlywed’s current hike brings about a dramatic change of scenery—from a media-centric city life to an unkempt plot of countryside that must, like her life itself, be husbanded.  After the honeymoon that opens this book, the unspoken “what next?” begins to blare loudly. This turn of the plow could unearth motherhood but, in Garnett’s case, it turns up something else. Channeling this poet’s keen mind, churning with midlife’s thorniest dilemmas, Shit Hike traipses through wildly incongruous modes, turning on a dime between the pastoral and the peeving, acceptance and resistance, through both comedy and loss. The result is a thrilling journey into the thoughts and feelings of Garnett’s exploration through these new unpaved fields. 

"Corny, horny, bathetic, sublime, these poems ('leaked / forces') eavesdrop on their author at her most intimate ('Aw peaches!'), strangefying little moments ('secret smirches') in time. As she moves from city to country, what awaits is not a pastoral dreamscape but the reality of marriage and middle age (a 'shit hike' of sorts). But this book is not 'about' all that so much as it’s about the pleasure and perversity of being alive in the world, each day’s leaping syntax and its crunch… 'Let me not / Lose poetry' it cries out to the angelic orders. It has so much heart." —Sara Nicholson

"Callie Garnett's Shit Hike is an anti-romantic, anti-sentimental improvisational leap-frogging rumination on the human condition. Reading these poems is like being inside a mind that moves so quickly it can't quite—or refuses to—conclude. Beneath the skittery facade, there is regret, tenderness, meditations on love and its difficulties, and a vivid look into 'the habit of dreaming' that is both the material and the method of these pyrotechnic poems.” —Catherine Barnett

Callie Garnett is the author of the poetry collection Wings in Time (The Song Cave), a New York Times best poetry book of the year, and the chapbooks On Knowingness (The Song Cave) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Ugly Duckling). She works as Editorial Director of Fiction and Memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing (US), and lives in Esopus, NY.